The problem of media content piracy and digital rights management (DRM) is both well-known and significant. At the present time, there is no reliable way to provide both video and audio content to end-users while simultaneously preventing them from making unauthorized, digital copies of the media. To make things worse, digital copies of the media can often be produced without any loss in quality. One known weak point in the transmission of media content from an internet store to a local device, such as a desktop computer, laptop or a smartphone, is the operating system of the local device. Both the operating system and/or the applications running under it can be easily attacked by the end-user.
What is needed are systems, methods and apparatuses for precluding software-based methods of content duplication by end-users. While other methods of unauthorized content duplication (e.g., hardware or server-side software) may still exist (due to the very nature of content delivery), these attacks are much more technically complicated than software replication, and fewer numbers of individuals engage in these. Thus, precluding software-only content duplication, which is the most widespread form of media content piracy, will severely limit numbers of the content pirates capable of such copying.